Posted
by
samzenpus
on Friday February 26, 2010 @12:12PM
from the we're-not-unreasonable-I-mean-no-one's-gonna-eat-your-eyes dept.

An appeals court in Minneapolis, Minnesota has overturned a lower court ruling, finding that a group of seven "zombies" had been wrongfully detained during a 2006 shopping mall protest. The decision allows the zombies to continue with their lawsuit against police who arrested them for disorderly conduct. "An objectively reasonable person would not think probable cause exists under the Minnesota disorderly conduct statue to arrest a group of peaceful people for engaging in an artistic protest by playing music, broadcasting statements (and) dressing as zombies," the appeals court ruled.

Under the law, the shopping mall management has the right to bar anybody they want to from being on their property. If they refuse to leave, they can then be arrested for trespass. If the protesters were in fact on public property, then the article is correct -- the police should have left them alone.

I suspect they would not have been arrested if the mall management had not complained and called the cops. It's not like gangs of cops routinely patrol shopping malls looking for the undead... of course, it is possible that the zombies' mistake was strolling past a donut shop in the mall. Mall security should have ask the protesters to leave, and should only have called the cops if they refused to comply. I don't know all the facts, so I can only speculate on what should have happened, not what actually hap